The Office of Human Resources will be closed this coming Thursday and Friday for a departmental retreat. The Office will re-open on Monday, September 19. If you need to reach a member of the HR Team, please use email.

Most events do have quite a few common planning elements. Check out the September BalanceWorks Newsletter for tips when planning your next event to make sure it goes off without a hitch and you are not left feeling stressed at the last minute.

In May of this year, the U.S. Department of Labor announced changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) that will impact the rules on overtime pay. The new law will become effective on December 1, 2016. These changes require employers to re-evaluate the exempt/non-exempt classification of positions due to the increase in the minimum salary threshold for the overtime exemption from $23,660 to $47,476 per year. Under the FLSA, positions must meet both the duties test and the salary test to qualify for the executive, administrative, or professional exemption from the minimum wage and the overtime provisions of the law. This new law does not automatically change overtime eligibility or require employers to increase salaries to the new exemption threshold. However, employers are encouraged to audit current exempt positions to determine the proper classification under the new law and make appropriate adjustments to achieve compliance.

In a recent question and answer interview, Brian Dickens identified changes to federal regulations as an immediate priority for the Office of Human Resources. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), recently amended, governs federal minimum wage and overtime pay requirements. This amendment was widely published as “the new overtime rule”. The new rule doubles the minimum salary for employees to qualify as “exempt” from the requirement of paying overtime for any hours worked in excess of 40 in a work week. Effective December 1, 2016, the new minimum salary will be $913 a week (or $47,476 per year). The previous threshold was $455 per week ($23,660 per year).

Expanding on the award-winning “Human at Work” presentation he shared at IC last December, Dave Cameron ’96 leads this series of lunchtime workshops offering practical steps to evaluate how you work now, identify your natural productivity style, and discover the best Goals, Tools, and Habits for improving how you get stuff done in a way that is achievable, sustainable, and shareable with others on your team.

Where does our time go? Somewhere in the middle of our overlapping project deadlines, meetings, and daily emails, we are all just trying to do good work, but it’s hard to keep up. We do our best to stay organized with productivity apps and calendars and “lifehacks” but in the end we are humans and easily distracted by funny videos of cats — how can we be expected to actually get stuff done each day?